Korea Artist Prize 2025

Kim Jipyeong Unmake Lab Kim YoungEun Im Youngzoo Korea Artist Prize is a leading contemporary artist support program and award system co-hosted by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and SBS Foundation since 2012, selecting four artists (teams) each year to support the production and exhibition of new works. For its 10th anniversary in 2023, to provide a (non-)linear and layered view of the artists’ world, a change was made by showcasing existing major works alongside new works. Featured artists at Korea Artist Prize 2025 are Kim YoungEun, Im Youngzoo, Kim Jipyeong, and Unmake Lab. Kim YoungEun creates artworks that focus on sound and listening as political and historical products and forms of practice. She explores how sound and listening are shaped and technologically developed within particular historical contexts and what possibilities listening can generate in the processes of knowledge production and decolonization. Im Youngzoo examines the processes through which superstition, belief, and religious faith are accepted and shaped within Korean society, comparing these “uncertain beliefs” with scientific and technological development, and imagining what lies beyond reality, shaping existential stories about death, apocalypse, and outer space. Kim Jipyeong has critically interpreted traditional thoughts and ways of seeing found in the concept and technique of Dongyanghwa (Eastern painting). The artist believes that recognized tradition has already become a part of modernity, and tries to re-engage the non-registered art, wild thinking, and myths that have been excluded by tradition. Unmake Lab is a collective formed by Choi Binna and Song Sooyon, focusing on reconstructing the current social and ecological situation into speculative landscapes by intersecting the history of Korean developmentalism with the nature of artificial intelligence (datasets, computer vision, and generative neural network). Through diverse media and subject matter, the four artists (teams) trace the unsensible — layers of the world that are hidden, omitted, marginalized, or forgotten. Following the question “How can the invisible be made visible?,” they dissect the mechanics of representation and challenge the very ways in which we perceive the world. Korea Artist Prize 2025 seeks to explore the new sensibilities and narratives that emerge at the intersections opened by the artists, as they traverse themes such as the entanglements of listening and politics, tradition and Dongyanghwa, superstition and science, and technology and the human. Gathered together as “the ones who look for the invisible at the boundaries, but also look towards different places,” the worlds of the four artists (teams) will be enriched as it embodies the ways in which they step on, cross and inhabit the boundaries they create.